You and me both. Not to sound like an old fart or anything but the stuff that's around now bears next to no resemblance to what I remember from my misspent youth. It doesn't even smell the same.
You don't need a basement to do what I think you want to do. A small closet is more than enough space for four plants which for personal should yield more than enough until the next yield. Don't worry about the cost of the light, after some trial and error it more than pays for itself.
I have a lot more basement space than closet space. In fact, I'm going to have to use part of my basement as a closet. I would much prefer to grow it in the backyard but we have a ridiculously short growing season here - it's hard enough to grow legal herbs year-round. I dunno, I'll have to see how it goes around here.
The law was implemented in the southern provinces of the Netherlands where French and German kids coming across the border to buy pot were causing issues due to sheer volume of car traffic on weekends - which made getting into the old part of cities (i.e. Maastricht) that have choke points at city gates very time consuming for non-pot shoppers and locals. It was scheduled to be implemented in January of 2013 in A'dam, but there was local opposition, and based on my limited discussion with coffee shop employees/owners roughly 70% of their business was from tourists and would have had a major impact on the local economy. A'dam is unique in having a very large number of coffee shops - far more than in other Dutch cities. This law has been scrapped recently including the southern provinces, due to a change in the Dutch government and local disregard for the law in the south. Unlikely - they don't have this at Schiphol - though edibles do work better than any other flying sleep aid I've tried. Cannabinoids (THC et al) are fat and alcohol soluble, the trick is getting the plant matter out of the fat/alcohol. Most coffee shops in NL sell cakes and cookies that don't taste any different than regular cakes and cookies. A dosage of 0.2g of THC was common on the packaging of 'space cake' when I was in NL - I assume they used a method called washed cannabutter (I'd say NSFW if you Google that) - that removes the plant matter and fertilizer salts from the butter. If you took high school chemistry or Home Ec this is pretty straightforward to do.
easy, make PBR illegal instead Or hedge funds When I lived in the summer resort town of Erie Pa - I had no space either, so I had a small grow-closet set up in a U-Haul Wardrobe box lined with some foil for reflectivity, it even has a nice rack to hang lights from
When I was in college, we did this with seeds and stems. It was called "green, greasy, garbage butter." I've got to admit, "cannabutter" has a nicer ring to it.
I have friends who just used a fry pan, shake, and butter - the result was some very disgusting cookies. If you do it right you end up with ghee and can make pastries or any other food that uses butter.
Just get people to come together and maybe some ideas will spark. And then hopefully we can weed out the problems and things won't go to pot.